Princeton University and Boston University researchers have developed a silicon wafer that can isolate cancer cells by separating them out according to size.

I don't have access to full text articles at new scientist but this was an idea I discussed with nano many years ago on a long car trip: Placing a nanotech filter in the blood stream to clean out circulating cancer cells. I figure it ought to be possible to do the same thing with virii...

Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.

In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say.

This seems to support the theory that environmental pressure can produce evolutionary adaptation in large organisms over short periods of time. However, this new species could be the result of interbreeding between the two original species, producing a third species that outlasted the prior two...

In the new work, the team took skin cells -- some from Wood's arm and some from an anonymous Stemagen investor -- and fused them to eggs from women who were donating their eggs to help infertile women. About one-quarter of the resulting clones, or five in all, developed into five-day-old blastocysts...

"I have to admit, it's a very strange feeling. It is very difficult to look at an embryo and realize it is what you were a few decades ago. It is you, in a way."

Well, there is a future shock moment for you.

I'd like to know what folks on MemeStreams think about this, particularly from a bio-ethics perspective. This is a far cry from questions about federal funding for stem cell research. In this case human embryos were created for the purpose of research, and were subsequently destroyed.

Clearly, if you are opposed to abortion, you must also think this murder. In any event it raises the same sort of ethical question. At what point does a blastocyst turn into something that has civil rights?

I think these questions are going to get harder and harder to answer. I'll refrain from offering my own opinion here just yet.

On Saturday night SymbioticA will be talking about some of their past projects, such as growing humane leather from individual skin cells and using a rotating micro-gravity bioreactor to create an actual human ear.

On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.

Last week, The Lancet released a study stating that an influenza pandemic similar to the so-called Spanish flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people between 1918 and 1920 would kill about 62 million people today, with 96 percent of the deaths occurring in developing countries (details here, free registration required). It is reassuring to learn that researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have succeeded in imaging one of the viruses that causes influenza. So far, they've studied the H3N2 strain, but they could soon image other ones. This finding could help to discover how antibodies inactivate the virus — and maybe save millions of lives.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have successfully directed adult stem cells from mice to develop into bone and muscle cells with the aid of a custom-designed ink-jet printer.

Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA - New York Times

Topic: Biology

2:47 pm EDT, Jul 25, 2006

The genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. The second code, superimposed on the first, sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself.